June 25, 2009

Teacher 1: "Walking into a classroom that doesn’t have all that media is like walking into a desert."

"...collect information from other sources, and borrow, and steal, and put it together and reshape it. Isn’t that a skill that I want them to have?"

"I am not saying that cheating is okay. I am saying that cheating is something you have to look at closer to say what is cheating and what’s not cheating?"

Teacher 2: "Students know how to do things I can’t do technologically in the classroom and I just let them take over and they are naturals."

"I feel at though I am fighting the good fight. I am trying to hang on to what I think is the most important part of what I do. But, my time is over. This is too much for me. It’s not the educational arena I entered into."

Two teachers dealing with the cultural changes to the educational landscape caused by technology. Which one describes you?

Teaching SchoolThe
school would be a combination of regular school, teacher preparation
school, and a research school that combines educational theory with
brain theory. Think of a teaching hospital. Teachers who are currently
teaching, aspiring teachers learning and interacting daily with
students and teachers, and educational researchers working with brain
researchers to develop new teaching theory.

Great relationships between student and teachersGreat relationships enhance learning and reduce stress which decreases learning.

Students are taught to love learningStudents
learn that learning is about intrinsic curiosity and desire. Students
love to learn because they see the intrinsic value of it, and not to
earn a grade.

Parallel schedulesBecause
some brains are more effective during different parts of the day, there
would be two schedules to match the needs of teachers and students who
work better early or late.

ExerciseRecess
would be held twice a day. In the morning, 20-30 minutes of aerobic
activity, followed later in the day with 20-30 of strength training and
stretching. Students would wear gym clothes all day. Tread mills would
be installed in classrooms to further increase opportunities for
students to exercise while learning.

Small Class SizesSmall
class sizes allow teacher to better understand the inner motivation of
their students, easily seeing if a student is engaged or confused and
if the teaching is being transformed into learning. Teachers would
think of themselves as managers of minds, and the fewer minds to manage
the better.

TechnologyAdaptive
software that adjusts to the needs of each student would be used to
better individualize and differentiate for student needs.

Lecture and Lesson Design (1) The
introduction is key. How the teacher introduces the material has a huge
impact on learning. Lesson would be broken into 10-minute blocks, each
of which focuses on a single subject or objective, the gist of which
can be explained in 1 minute. In between each 10-minute block an
Emotionally Competent Stimuli (ECS) will be place to grab the student’s
attention by triggering emotion and make the subject matter relevant.
During the lesson blocks, the teacher will provide a mental map of the
lesson and will check with the students to ensure that they know where
they have been and where they are going in the lesson.

Lecture and Lesson Design (2)Lesson
or lectures will be highly visual. Many photos and computer animations
will be made use of. Lesson will be multi-sensory to the extent
possible. Heavy use of real world examples will be used to help make
meaningful connections.

Lesson ReviewAfter
lessons, students will be given time to talk and think about the
learning. Reviews of material would be scheduled every 3-4 days. These
reviews would be multi-sensory as well.

Teacher EvaluationTeachers would be screened for their ability to manage minds, understand their students, and create brain focused lesson plans.

So there you have it. The ultimate guide to the Brain Rules school design.

January 09, 2009

From Mark Batterson's blog Evotional.com: Spirit Fuel, comes this interesting thought. I has implications for all of our learners, be it school, church, or corporate training. The power of persistence.

I came across a fascinating study this week. Can't stop thinking about it. Priscilla Blinco did a study involving Japanese and American first graders. She gave them a very difficult puzzle to solve. The American children lasted, on average, 9.47 minutes. The Japanese children lasted 13.93 minutes or 40% longer.

Any one want to guess who has higher scores on standardized math tests?

Fascinating
study with interesting implication. The argument is that we might give
IQ more credit than it deserves. Persistence quotient might be a better
predictor of success! How long are you willing to try something before giving up? Successful people, in every arena, aren't just smarter. They try harder and try longer.

What would it mean for our teaching if we knew our students would last a little longer? What might that mean for your school, your church, or your business? What would the cummulative effects of this look like over years of teaching and learning?

What
ever happened to scribes? Scribes were one of the most essential of
professions in the 1400’s. Few people could write, and it was the
scribes that hand copied existing written work. If not for scribes, the
loss of ideas, wisdom, and knowledge would have been lost through the
ravages of time on existing written work. The scribe was crucially
important and irreplaceable, for it was the scribe who was able to
preserve and pass on the knowledge of the past and current.

Then,
one day, scribes became outdated. They had been replaced by movable
type. It didn’t happen all at once of course. For a time scribes worked
simultaneously with publishers using the printing press, but the
reality was that the society in which they labored had fundamentally
changed. The protestant reformation and the printing of bibles in many
languages were transforming the society in which scribes and printers
worked.

Scribes, not wanting to lose ground to the printers,
published a very eloquent defense of scribes. The hypocrisy of it was
that they used the printing press to publish it. Times had changed. The
society was different and the technology of the day, the printing
press, allowed for those changes to continue and spread. Scribes were
no longer essential as they had once been before, swept out in the
revolution of the reformation and the bible in many languages. The
printing press was the technology that made it easier, not the cause.

As Clay Shirky writes,
“Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary
times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary times, because
professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession. In
most cases, those threats are also threats to society…”

He continues, “But in some cases the change that threatens the profession benefits society, as did the spread of the printing press…”

Education
and classroom teachers are in much the same situation as the scribes of
the 1400’s were. How is that you ask? Simple, we are in a revolution
of how our society connects, communicates, and in many regards, how it
functions. The technology of the web has changed how we communicate. It
has made it possible to communicate and teach from virtually anywhere.
Learning is no longer limited to the teacher in the classroom or the
brick and mortar school. Learning can take place anyplace and at
anytime with web technologies. Online courses, online schools, etc.
have arisen and benefited from the revolution of our 2.0 society.

The
train has left the station on virtual education. It may not be heavily
adopted yet, but it will. Why wouldn’t it? We in education can resist,
fight it, and even argue against it, but like the scribe of the 1400’s,
we are living in revolutionary times and we are working along side
virtual schools, teachers, and classrooms. The shift is already
beginning, the question for us becomes, adapt to it and adopt it, or go
the way of the scribe. I think we are much too smart not to do the
former, and far too important to do the latter.

But so did the scribes.

Derek Baird at his excellent blog, Barking Robot has an excellent post in which he summarizes some of the most current research on e-learning. Take a look.

Catalytic Questions:

In what ways might your old beliefs or assumptions about education need to be eliminated?

How might you combine web based technologies and virtual learning opportunities into your educational plan?

In
what ways would you need to modify your existing instructional model
and methods to meet the needs of online or virtual teaching and
learning?

If you imagined yourself as a student, what sorts of things would you want in online education or virtual learning?

How
might you allow your school or district’s virtual teaching and learning
programs develop? In what areas might you need to force the action?

In what ways might you adapt the online-based technologies you use frequently to develop your online education plan?

What else might you need to think about?

Where else can you look for ideas, methods, and models for online or virtual learning?

November 24, 2008

Discovered this video from my PLN. It was created by the The New Media Literacies Project. According to their site..."Project New Media Literacies (NML), a research initiative based within MIT's Comparative Media Studies
program, explores how we might best equip young people with the social
skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants
in an emergent media landscape and raise public understanding about
what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected,
multicultural world."

This group is doing some great work in this field.

The video list these skills as part of the New Media Literacies student will need to learn.

Hood proposes that genome and DNA sequencing be the basis of a new health care system centered on the four Ps. What are the fours Ps and what do they have to do with education you ask? Let me explain.

The four Ps: Predictive, Preventive, Personalized, and Participatory.

Predictive:In
health care this means using genome sequencing and blood tests, a
doctor will be able to predict a patients likelihood of getting certain
diseases.

Education too should be predictive. Assessments
should be given early and frequent as a students brain develops to
identify and predict the likelihood of developing certain learning
disabilities and problems. Following a Response To Intervention
like model, students identified to likely develop learning disabilities
could be given the support they need at an early age. Predictive
testing and assessments can get students the resources they need at an
early age.

Preventive: In health care this means using an individual risk profile to start therapies in advance to cut the likelihood of illness.

In
education, preventive means using individual assessment profiles to
identify the best strategies, methods, programs, and resources that
should be directed at a student early on to interdict learning problems
and disabilities at an early age. The prevention will be customized to
the individual learner’s needs.

Personalized: In
health care this means using millions of data points to create drug
therapies that are suited to each genome, eliminating the “trial and
error” approach of doctors today.

In education, personalized
assessment profiles could be used to customize learning experiences to
maximize the education experience for each student. In addition to
using the assessment profiles for learning disabilities or problems, a
system based on personalization will take into account a student’s
interests, curiosity, brain, personality, behavior, family, economic
situation, and a multitude of other factors. These can be used to
create a personalized educational experience, the type of experience
the Open Model of Education can provide.

Participatory: In
health care this means people become involved in their own health care
by treating the symptoms and by learning about their own
predisposition.

In education this means changing the focus for
teaching to learning. This puts an emphasis on the learner allows the
learner to have input into how they want to learn, when they want to
learn, where they want to learn, whom they want to learn from, and what
they want to learn. When learners participate in their own education,
the Open Model of Education becomes an obviously better delivery model for teaching.

In short education need to adopt the four Ps as a basis for how to build a new education focused the best of what teachers, students, and parents have to offer each other.

November 04, 2008

While I sat in my health class today pondering if I had a greater chance of getting Lime disease or the West Nile virus, a discussion broke out among my classmates on the problem with kids using technology to share tests, test questions, and answers with their fellow students. Also indicted was the Internet. Seems the Internet has allowed students to share test question or even find all the versions of tests that the textbook publishers create for teachers. Apparently, some teacher on the other side of the country posted all the versions and the answers on the Internet and these kids found it. How dare they!

I chuckled inside as I listened to teachers from all over the spectrum bemoan how easy technology has allowed this to happen and how much info students were able to find on then Internet these days. They were arguing about how best to put the genie back in the bottle.

Finally, after it looked like the Internet and technology were headed for a guilty verdict, I added a though or two to the conversation.

I pointed out that test questions and test answers are simply pieces of information. A question or an answer is simply a piece of information; a piece of data that can be discovered and shared like any other piece of information and data. They may not want it discovered or shared, but because it is digital or can be converted into digital pieces of data, the information can and will be shared. I simply asked if anyone thought if finding and sharing of data and information would become easier or less easy in the coming years.

I could see the gears turning and then a bit of fear began to wash over them.

Then I approached it from the creativity and innovation angle. What the students were engaged in was cheating, piracy, and plagiarism. (Teach Students to be Pirates and Plagiarists) There is a great deal of creative thought and innovation in there somewhere. While educators now frown on what these pirate students do, their future employers will value these same students for being able to quickly, creatively, and innovatively find, remix, and share information and data.

I suggested that they focus on using assessments that required the students to generate new and meaningful ideas, connections, and insights with their knowledge and not just true/false or multiple-choice. I explained to them that we know live in an era where technology has made the discovery, sharing, and re-purposing of data and information, and that assessments that rely on data or information only questions are going to be subject this effect.

Assessments must change to require original thinking or use of the data or information, not simply recalling the information. Technology has made to need to memorize facts and information less important. If you can look it up on the Internet anytime you like, why memorize the data? If you are relying on tests that assess a student’s recall of data, don’t be amazed if they use technology to treat your test and it’s answers like data too.

A silent hush fell across the room, and I thought I heard a fear tears falling. Then, slowly, the group considered its options and rose together in one voice to say that they just didn’t want kids to use technology or the Internet anymore in their classroom, and maybe they should just hand write their tests or ban student cell phones.

Together, they determined, that maybe, just maybe, they could put the genie back in the bottle.

I smiled and went back to considering my odds of a sucking chest wound.